If you think flight = "Man in a controlled flight followd by a gentle landing".. then you probably haven't been reading the articles. The Wright's design is by all accounts damn near impossible to fly, and it's not like they took flying lessons beforehand. They almost certainly had plenty of crashes of their own before achieving their first 'sucessful' flight.
Any random end user I need to be able to send email
Spammer hacks their computer
Spammer can now send email (or do anything else that random end user could be doing on their computer)
Here's how it works when you (somehow, miraculously) manage to persuade billions of people to switch to a new mail protocol;
End user still needs to be able to send mail
Spammer hacks their box
Spammer can now (still) send email
A better solution might be to persuade millions of end users to SECURE THEIR FUCKING COMPUTERS, especially when they're on high speed connections. The best approach I've seen so far is that grey-hat hackers need to break in and really trash every hackable box they can find. After a few tedious reinstalls people will learn not to put an insecure machine on the net. Even stupid people, eventually.
All the other machines Diebold make, the 'transaction' is verified already. At one end of the transaction or the other, someone is quite likely to notice and complain if their ATM transaction got lost.
Ticket machine customers are generally going to notice if they get double-billed. Promoters are going to notice if they sold x tickets but only collected money for (x-n).
The paper trail exists to fix mistakes, not find them.
In the case of electronic voting, voters don't have any other way of knowing if the 'transaction' went through. As long as the results look plausable enough Diebold can simply ignore any minor glitches and pretend that their machines are quick, secure, and perfectly accurate. Having a paper trail and random auditing makes things so much more complicated for them.
Reminds me of a case I once read about (Readers Digest iirc, although I should perhaps check snopes in case it's an UL) of a doctor who had raped a patient. The courts ordered him to give a blood sample to match the DNA with so he created an 'artificial' vein by inserting plastic tubing down his arm filled with another patient's blood.
# "Smart" relay host (may be null) DSsmtp.maxnet.co.nz
I still run my own server, I can set up whatever filtering I want, other machines on my network never have to be reconfigured, but now all my mail is immediately forwarded through my ISP's mail server instead of being delivered directly.
BTW; My ISP doesn't block port 25 but many other ISP's won't accept mail from dialup and ADSL connections. I got sick of the bounces.
I haven't bothered to read all the comments yet, but the first page was all about how -bad- IRC is.
Well duh. Join many channels, and you get spammed with porno-page links. Leave the channel and you get a few more. What if Google are joining channels just to see who spams them, then ranking DOWN pages advertised that way. There's no easy way for google to detect artificial link farms, referer spamming or whatever, but it's a fair guess that many the pages being promoted this way will also be spammed on IRC. Google's results will improve a lot if they downgrade or remove such pages.
They might also count channel-topic links equivalent to ordinary web-page links. I seriously doubt they'd bother looking at channel text, although I guess they could look out for links they don't already have to seed the crawlers.
By this logic we don't live in the modern age but rather some ancient one.
And several thousand years ago, "Ug who cut meat with broken stone and cooked meat over fire" was considered by his peers to be an advanced, perhaps even enlightened, being. What's your point again?
Sure.. not sure who said it (Pascal?!), but "when you manage to produce a computer that understands plain english, you'll discover that programmers can't actually write plain english!"
The problem with most spyware is that if you simply remove it, the software that installed it will also stop working. When the user notices this they will reinstall the software.
You need to find out what the user installed that contained spyware and make sure that software still works or replace it with a non-spyware equivalent. Then make sure the client is happy with the new software, understands why you changed it, and knows why they should NOT reinstall the original software.
But not a problem, on google.com I just specify the site by saying 'Iraq site:whitehouse.gov' and it had 14,000 hits... the first one is the root of/infocus/iraq directory (which is dissallowed in robots.txt)
Well DUH!!
They only just changed it. Wait a week or so and most of those hits will have vanished. That's the whole point of this article.
I'm a bit confused about what they're trying to do however; it looks like they've just duped every line that ends in/text and made a/iraq version, most of them don't even exist.
Design the device to make the lights go RED in all directions. Emergency vehicles can safely drive around the waiting traffic on the 'wrong' side of the road, because there's no oncoming traffic. There's no 'subtle' way for a non-emergency vehicle to use this type of device.
But the Outlook worm designed to do this isn't scheduled until next week. There's no way to move it up, there are too many other releases in the pipeline.
It was quite a long time between flashable BIOSes and this getting released.
I think Murphy's Law (the original form) applies here; if you design hardware that can be destroyed[1] in software, someone will figure out how to incorporate that into a virus.
[1] Many people have nitpicked that reflashing a BIOS isn't actually destroying hardware. Technically perhaps it isn't, but in the case of surface-mounted BIOSes it's not practical to reflash/repair the BIOS. If the cheapest repair option is buying a new motherboard, I consider the old one effectively 'destroyed'.
Easy; When you generate your mangled GIF image, also create a wav/mp3 containing the same information (eg using TTS software, or by concatenating pre-recorded audio files).
Most blind users are running windows with JAWS or similar screen-reading software, and sites like ACB release a lot of their content as mp3's already, so I'd assume that most are well equipped to handle web audio.
You sure about that? There's already been an article on/. about how the UK slot machines are rigged..
I've always thought that the EFTPOS people should bne given the job. The EFTPOS network has already shown that it can handle the kind of load involved (most people make a few transactions per day, I'd imagine it averages out) with 99.999% reliability and complete end-to-end auditability.
When I hear of voting machines crashing, recording wrong votes, or 'losing' 12% or more of the votes with no audit trail it makes me sick. There's simply no excuse for it.
I gather they mean 'ten most unusual' ways of losing data, which would be the exact opposite of a 'top ten' list. But it's hard to tell. Lots of people leave laptops on car roofs, etc, very few people shoot them.
If it was the ten most common ways of losing data, I would expect the most common would be "windows viruses", "user stupidity" and "tech support replacing a perfectly good harddrive that has developed an almost unnoticable whine on the basis that this might one day fail and cause data loss, without making a backup first"
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody really cares when the millenium began or ended, the year 2000 began on Jan 1, 2000.
Or if you screwed up the bugfix it began on 1/1/1900, 1/1/2100, 1/1/20100, 1/1/19100, or any of several other amusing variations.
If you think flight = "Man in a controlled flight followd by a gentle landing".. then you probably haven't been reading the articles. The Wright's design is by all accounts damn near impossible to fly, and it's not like they took flying lessons beforehand. They almost certainly had plenty of crashes of their own before achieving their first 'sucessful' flight.
God forbid that anyone outside of the USA might have ever been first at anything
Waitomo is well away from any of the bigger cities, so they won't have ADSL, and possible even have fairly low-grade phone lines.
Also, decent broadband is -expensive- over here, depending on what plan you have, you get about 500M free and then pay 15c per meg, or more.
Or you can get 128k with a 10G cap, and 10c/M over that..
Typical pricing
here (Telecom 0wn the market, so most other ISP's have similar pricing)
So even if full-rate ADSL was available, the pigeons would still be a hell of a lot cheaper.
How is a new mail protocol going to help exactly?
Here's how it works currently;
Any random end user I need to be able to send email
Spammer hacks their computer
Spammer can now send email (or do anything else that random end user could be doing on their computer)
Here's how it works when you (somehow, miraculously) manage to persuade billions of people to switch to a new mail protocol;
End user still needs to be able to send mail
Spammer hacks their box
Spammer can now (still) send email
A better solution might be to persuade millions of end users to SECURE THEIR FUCKING COMPUTERS, especially when they're on high speed connections. The best approach I've seen so far is that grey-hat hackers need to break in and really trash every hackable box they can find. After a few tedious reinstalls people will learn not to put an insecure machine on the net. Even stupid people, eventually.
Here's my take;
All the other machines Diebold make, the 'transaction' is verified already. At one end of the transaction or the other, someone is quite likely to notice and complain if their ATM transaction got lost.
Ticket machine customers are generally going to notice if they get double-billed. Promoters are going to notice if they sold x tickets but only collected money for (x-n).
The paper trail exists to fix mistakes, not find them.
In the case of electronic voting, voters don't have any other way of knowing if the 'transaction' went through. As long as the results look plausable enough Diebold can simply ignore any minor glitches and pretend that their machines are quick, secure, and perfectly accurate. Having a paper trail and random auditing makes things so much more complicated for them.
Reminds me of a case I once read about (Readers Digest iirc, although I should perhaps check snopes in case it's an UL) of a doctor who had raped a patient. The courts ordered him to give a blood sample to match the DNA with so he created an 'artificial' vein by inserting plastic tubing down his arm filled with another patient's blood.
From the movie "Trading Places"
That's part of the research; designing equipment that can forward, filter, prioritise, and route traffic at that kind of bandwidth.
Does this count?
I still run my own server, I can set up whatever filtering I want, other machines on my network never have to be reconfigured, but now all my mail is immediately forwarded through my ISP's mail server instead of being delivered directly.
BTW; My ISP doesn't block port 25 but many other ISP's won't accept mail from dialup and ADSL connections. I got sick of the bounces.
I haven't bothered to read all the comments yet, but the first page was all about how -bad- IRC is.
Well duh. Join many channels, and you get spammed with porno-page links. Leave the channel and you get a few more. What if Google are joining channels just to see who spams them, then ranking DOWN pages advertised that way. There's no easy way for google to detect artificial link farms, referer spamming or whatever, but it's a fair guess that many the pages being promoted this way will also be spammed on IRC. Google's results will improve a lot if they downgrade or remove such pages.
They might also count channel-topic links equivalent to ordinary web-page links. I seriously doubt they'd bother looking at channel text, although I guess they could look out for links they don't already have to seed the crawlers.
By this logic we don't live in the modern age but rather some ancient one.
And several thousand years ago, "Ug who cut meat with broken stone and cooked meat over fire" was considered by his peers to be an advanced, perhaps even enlightened, being. What's your point again?
Oh yeah.. it's all relative..
Sure.. not sure who said it (Pascal?!), but "when you manage to produce a computer that understands plain english, you'll discover that programmers can't actually write plain english!"
The problem with most spyware is that if you simply remove it, the software that installed it will also stop working. When the user notices this they will reinstall the software.
You need to find out what the user installed that contained spyware and make sure that software still works or replace it with a non-spyware equivalent. Then make sure the client is happy with the new software, understands why you changed it, and knows why they should NOT reinstall the original software.
But not a problem, on google.com I just specify the site by saying 'Iraq site:whitehouse.gov' and it had 14,000 hits... the first one is the root of /infocus/iraq directory (which is dissallowed in robots.txt)
/text and made a /iraq version, most of them don't even exist.
Well DUH!!
They only just changed it. Wait a week or so and most of those hits will have vanished. That's the whole point of this article.
I'm a bit confused about what they're trying to do however; it looks like they've just duped every line that ends in
PROBLEM; Light goes green.
Design the device to make the lights go RED in all directions. Emergency vehicles can safely drive around the waiting traffic on the 'wrong' side of the road, because there's no oncoming traffic. There's no 'subtle' way for a non-emergency vehicle to use this type of device.
But the Outlook worm designed to do this isn't scheduled until next week. There's no way to move it up, there are too many other releases in the pipeline.
It was quite a long time between flashable BIOSes and this getting released.
I think Murphy's Law (the original form) applies here; if you design hardware that can be destroyed[1] in software, someone will figure out how to incorporate that into a virus.
[1] Many people have nitpicked that reflashing a BIOS isn't actually destroying hardware. Technically perhaps it isn't, but in the case of surface-mounted BIOSes it's not practical to reflash/repair the BIOS. If the cheapest repair option is buying a new motherboard, I consider the old one effectively 'destroyed'.
I post my address unobfuscated, you insensitive clod!
Help us prevent plant piracy!
Three words for you..
"Roundup-Ready Canola"
The same way you stop OCR programs from recognising the text in images.. add some background noise and distort the voice a little.
Easy; When you generate your mangled GIF image, also create a wav/mp3 containing the same information (eg using TTS software, or by concatenating pre-recorded audio files).
Most blind users are running windows with JAWS or similar screen-reading software, and sites like ACB release a lot of their content as mp3's already, so I'd assume that most are well equipped to handle web audio.
Can anyone explain the discontinuities in the FreeBSD plots?
.. BSD is dying. :)
I would have thought that was obvious..
You sure about that? There's already been an article on /. about how the UK slot machines are rigged..
I've always thought that the EFTPOS people should bne given the job. The EFTPOS network has already shown that it can handle the kind of load involved (most people make a few transactions per day, I'd imagine it averages out) with 99.999% reliability and complete end-to-end auditability.
When I hear of voting machines crashing, recording wrong votes, or 'losing' 12% or more of the votes with no audit trail it makes me sick. There's simply no excuse for it.
I gather they mean 'ten most unusual' ways of losing data, which would be the exact opposite of a 'top ten' list. But it's hard to tell. Lots of people leave laptops on car roofs, etc, very few people shoot them.
If it was the ten most common ways of losing data, I would expect the most common would be "windows viruses", "user stupidity" and "tech support replacing a perfectly good harddrive that has developed an almost unnoticable whine on the basis that this might one day fail and cause data loss, without making a backup first"